Hugh Jackman why Mental Health needs to be talked about

For me, I'm getting help with a therapist around it, and understanding, and reading, and listening, and humility, and it's really, really hard. Hugh, it's great to have you here. I was just looking on your Instagram on the way in to work today. I would say, looking at what you get up to in terms of the promotion for this great movie, you enjoy what you do. You have a good time. You feel blessed to do what you do. Some people seem like a bit of a chore, but you seem to love it, which is good. You mean the promoting bit? Promoting bit, just anything that's involved in this line of work. I love it all. No, not all, but I love the filming bit. I love the preparation for it, the rehearsal, and I love the promoting of it. I love travelling. I particularly love being here, and one of the reasons, honestly, why I did this movie... Bush? Yes. I'm not named after anyone in particular. George W. Bush and... Bush and... what was it? Richie Banner. No, Bush and... Bush and Feltz. Honestly, one of the reasons I did it was because I really felt these are conversations that are hard to have, that we need to have in homes, in society in general. I'm thrilled that you have me on here, and I'm thrilled that we get a chance to talk about it, because I know we're mainly here to have a laugh and entertain people, but there comes a time, even with our best mates, even when you're at the pub having a good bit of a banter, sometimes we need to really find space to talk about things that are really affecting us. Because men are quite bad, aren't they? We've seen men are quite bad at talking about stuff like how they feel. I've learned so much about it doing this film, and we are bad. We do a lot of banter. It often goes as deep as, how are you doing? Yeah, no, good, good. I've got some struggles at work, but I'm fine. It's fine, fine. Everything's fine. Everything good at home? Yeah, no, it's okay. No, no, we're fine. It goes about that. By the way, I've learned, since learned, the word fine is the biggest red flag you'll ever hear. Is this the one to watch out for? Yeah, I didn't know that, but now that I know it, you watch how often people will say fine. And the advice I got while I was doing this movie was, if anyone says fine, you just stop everything to say, sit down, what's going on? And you'll always dig under there's something bad going on for them. We say about how much you enjoy what you do, but we speak about the film, it's got so many different layers. You've got the relationship between a father and a son, divorce, parenting, mental health. You enjoy what you do, but surely this must have been one of the most intense projects you must have worked on. Yeah, it's intense. Every day was intense. It's dealing with a 17-year-old, my son, who has acute depression. You don't know why. You never really find out why, because often there is no single why. And it's really a film about how it affects everyone around them. And my character is constantly trying to fix things, make it better. I can save my son. I can get him out of this funk. I'll be the one to do it. And as an audience, you watch the water rising around him, even though he's feeling in control. And so every day on set, it was emotional, it was intense. And also there was this feeling I had to have as a character where it's going to be okay, it's going to be okay. And as an actor, it's kind of what you want. I mean, I could act all day long, just us having breakfast and having a bit of a chitchat or doing whatever. But in the end, I want to do things that move people, make them laugh, make them yell or whatever, or make them cry. That's what we want to do. And it's hard, but I like it. There's an irony in what you're saying about wanting to fix things and all this. The three of us all here as fathers, you've obviously been involved in superhero movies. But we put this pressure on ourselves as fathers to be the ones like, we can fix this and all that. And at times, there isn't necessarily always the fix that we can do, is there? No. And being vulnerable about that, I've learned that. I've changed as a parent from doing this movie. I have a 17-year-old and a 22-year-old. So I think I was guilty of being a bit of the mindset of, don't burden your kids with your problems. Or they want to see and feel strength, they want to feel safe. Like, don't worry, you're the captain of the ship and I know where we're going. But I find that if I say, you know what, guys, even in an argument, I'll go, I don't know. I've never done this before. I've never been a parent before, I don't know what the answer is. It really disarms them. And it can start a real conversation where you're including them. So there must be a lot of parents who are going to watch this film. There's a lot of parents who will be listening to this interview. And they'll be in the same kind of situation where they don't know what the right thing is to do. And you get this battle between, say, and this is what's borne out in the movie, between medical professionals and what your child is telling you. And that's a huge thing for parents, isn't it? Like, the kid says, I'm fine, I don't need this treatment. And the doctors are giving you different advice. There's a real conflict with that, isn't there? A huge conflict. And it's okay not to know. Yeah. I think that's what the movie's trying to say. It's really trying to, you can see both points of view. Like, there's a psychiatric scene where the boy's been admitted into a psychiatric hospital and the doctor's saying, keep the child here. And the son is begging the father, don't abandon me, I'm fine. I don't know, take me out. And you feel the pull and the push. And what do the parents do? My son is begging me to take him out. I know you can help me, or the professional, and you don't know what to do. And that's okay. It's okay not to know. That's, I guess, what I would say. But it is something I think parents will, it's confronting, but it's really something we have to confront. But there's no, like, training for parents. I remember at school being taught to make a pencil case or make a PE, a bag for PE with drawstring with my initials on the front. But you don't get any kind of, like, they don't give you the chat about, down the line, you might end up being a parent. There's no manual for it. I guess that's the kind of problem. No, there's no manual. And there's a million books. And it's funny, when you become a parent, I became very much like my father when I became a parent. And my wife used to call me Chris, right? You know, oh, hello, Chris, because he loved a recipe. Give me a recipe and I'll follow it, right? So I had, I remember I had all these books by my bed, all the classic books, a baby, what to do raising them, and I'm reading them. And I was like, no, no, Deb, it says here on page 34, we're meant to da-da-da-da-da-da. And I remember my mum pulling me aside and said, she calls me Hubie. She goes, Hubie, it's wonderful you're reading those books. She's had six kids. She said, it's wonderful you're reading those books, but I just want you to know, your kid hasn't read them. That's proper advice. It's interesting, obviously, the film, the play that it was from, called The Son, and you've got the relationship that your character has with your son, but obviously your character has a father, played by Anthony Hopkins, and there's that element as well. We are shaped by what's gone before, all of us, in what we do. You're spot on. It comes about halfway through the movie, my character goes to see his father. You're the son. And for the first half of the movie, it's centred around this boy, so you just assume the boy is the title of the movie, and then all of a sudden, as you said, we're all still children. And whether we like it or not, we carry internal voices from our parents, we carry scars, we carry the wonderful things, all the good things we get, but all of that is carried for our entire life, whether we have children or not. And when you have children, out they come, they come out to play. And you can say to the cows, come on, I will not do this. And before you know it, in an argument, words have come out of your mouth that are exactly the words you heard and hated growing up. It's almost inevitable, isn't it? Yeah, and to be really serious, because I think this is a serious topic, when somehow traumas are passed down from generation to generation, and it's so hard, it's like a wildfire goes through. It's really, really hard, no matter how much we consciously try to put your hands up, and it takes incredible courage to stand up to that wildfire and to say, it stops with me. And it takes help. For me, I'm getting help with a therapist around it, and understanding and reading and listening and humility, and it's really, really hard.